Lubar Fund for Public Policy Announced

Marquette University Law School The University has announced today that Sheldon B. Lubar has made a $2 million gift to the Law School. Mr. Lubar is a much-admired business and civic leader: he is the founder and chairman of Lubar & Co., has been a presidential appointee with Senate confirmation, and has engaged deeply in seeking to improve this region. The gift, one of the largest in the history of the Law School, will create the Lubar Fund for Public Policy. The Lubar Fund will support public policy research and initiatives, including conferences and symposia; faculty research; curriculum development; and programs that enhance the teaching of public policy issues at Marquette Law School. The gift represents extraordinary confidence by a renowned business and civic leader in our public policy work at the Law School. Although that work began to be distinctly recognized with the appointment of Mike Gousha several years ago, it has been my sense—more than an intuition but still evolving into a full plan—that we are only scratching the surface here. I look forward to our effort to mine this field, for the betterment of the community, and am grateful to Shel Lubar for his support and confidence.

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Do Briefs Matter?

I suspect many lawyers have had the experience of briefing and arguing a case before an appellate court, and then receiving an opinion back from the court that seems like it was written for another case, with the court simply not engaging with the parties’ major arguments.  Although anecdotes along these lines abound, no rigorous studies are available to show us how common such judicial nonresponsiveness is.

Part of the problem is that researchers would have to read a large volume of briefs and opinions, and then painstakingly sort out exactly which arguments were addressed and how thoroughly.  Not only would the work be tedious and time-consuming, but it would also be subject to reliability concerns in light of the subjectivity in deciding whether and how satisfactorily a court has responded to an argument.

Chad Oldfather, Joseph Bockhorst, and Brian Dimmer ’09 think they have a solution to these difficulties: automated research that uses computers to compare a large number of briefs and opinions quickly and objectively.  They describe their project in a new paper on SSRN entitled “Judicial Inaction in Action? Toward a Measure of Judicial Responsiveness.”  

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Debating Discovery

As I noted last week, I recently had the privilege of participating in a panel on the need for further amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure related to E-discovery. A video of the event can be found here. (It actually took place at the National Press Club and not the Mayflower Hotel.) For those who like this kind of thing, there’s some interesting stuff.  My argument is that we essentially provide an e-discovery safe harbor for “neutrally” adopted and consistently applied systems for the retention and retrieval of electronic information. Marty Redish wants to reconsider 1938 and, in particular, to place the cost of discovery on the requesting party. I agree but Ron Allen does not. Don Elliott wants to do it only in certain types of cases but, more provocatively, thinks that Rule 4 is unconstitutional.

My remarks begin at 26:00 with a shout out to this blog.

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